November 2017

Barracuda Networks, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-enabled security and data protection solutions, today announced it has acquired privately held Sonian Inc., a leading provider of public cloud archiving and business insights. This acquisition will deepen Barracuda's cloud archiving, and email security and management capabilities, as well as expand Barracuda's channel reach with the addition of key OEM partners.

Sonian's archiving and analytics capabilities enable customers to preserve, access and act on communications data, and apply these insights to their business to reduce risks and increase productivity. Using those insights, businesses can identify potential threats in communications data before they escalate into larger problems, which has become increasingly important in today's dynamic threat environment. Adding these capabilities to Barracuda's security platform deepens the security and data protection offering to customers in their Microsoft Office 365 and other cloud environments.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the launch of a number of open source foundations like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation and others. Most of these run under the Linux Foundation, but one of the largest open source foundation outside of that group’s orbit is the OpenStack Foundation, which — at least until now — has solely focused on the development of the OpenStack cloud computing platform.

Times are changing, though. After spending the last few days at the bi-annual OpenStack Summit, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the OpenStack Foundation is starting to look beyond the OpenStack platform and that the future of the organization may just look a bit more like the Linux Foundation, though with a more streamlined vision that will have the group focus on open infrastructure projects that align with its current interests but that don’t necessarily need to be part of the OpenStack platform or follow the current guidelines for these projects.

Electric Cloud, the leader in Adaptive Release Automation, today announced a new version of its flagship ElectricFlow DevOps Automation platform, which includes enhanced capabilities to better manage, deliver and report on applications in both microservices and zOS mainframe environments.

"Today's applications are complex - from mobile, distributed, cloud, microservices, to mainframe - often all at the same time," said Carmine Napolitano, CEO of Electric Cloud. "Delivering these applications smoothly and ensuring everything works together can cause a lot of anxiety and friction. The new functionality in ElectricFlow helps eliminate toolchain and process silos among these various groups. This means that mainframe teams can now fully participate in a company's digital transformation efforts. It also means it's both safe -- and easy -- for developers and downstream operations teams to adapt to and adopt modern technologies, like microservices."

NeuVector, which delivers continuous network security for containers, today announced the immediate availability of NeuVector 1.3, the most significant release of the container firewall security solution since its initial launch. Adapting to evolving container security needs, NeuVector 1.3 features a wealth of key security, integration, and UI additions. NeuVector is also releasing a new Enterprise version of the solution, which features capabilities specifically designed for large-scale deployments.

NeuVector is the only true Layer 7 container firewall, providing Layer 7 filtering for all container traffic, along with network intelligence that understands application intent and disallows suspicious behavior. NeuVector 1.3 enhances these critical protections across several fronts, including the ability to detect attacks that rely on tunneling (a technique used to conceal attacks). The new release also adds automatic forensic capture on every detected threat, and makes it simple for security teams to safeguard connections to and from external and legacy networks. The NeuVector solution is compatible with Docker encrypted networks (enabling inspection of encrypted connections), and is also integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, Rancher, and Kubernetes.

Today, SoftwareONE announced cloud management enhancements for PyraCloud - its end-to-end platform for managing software portfolios from on-premises to the cloud. The latest enhancements provide insights on cloud consumption based on customer's business context and create a culture of accountability when using public clouds, such as Azure and AWS. It is critical that organizations discover and consistently track budget and spend across cloud providers in order to control costs. PyraCloud will enable organizations to manage cloud costs within budget across business units, cloud providers and applications.

According to IDC, the average business works with 13 different cloud service providers, and Gartner reports that organizations are finding public cloud bills to be two to three times more expensive than expected. PyraCloud's enhanced Cloud Management Module is designed to address this reality. The new capabilities give organizations visibility into the cloud assets being used, and by whom, facilitating better governance, budget management and spend across all cloud providers. With the latest enhancements to the PyraCloud platform, organizations can meet the business requirements of accountability, cost control and chargeback of cloud usage across business units.

The new enhancements to the Cloud Management Module offer four key benefits:

Rescale, the global provider of HPC in the cloud, today announced that NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink high-speed interconnect technology are now available on Rescale's ScaleX turnkey cloud platform for AI and high performance computing (HPC). The new GPUs are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and as dedicated bare metal nodes by SkyScale, a Rescale partner. All resources are accessible on an hourly basis with Rescale's more than 200 pre-installed and pre-tuned HPC applications.

With the addition of the Tesla V100 to the ScaleX platform, Rescale users gain instant, hourly access to the fastest, most powerful GPU on the market. Based on the highly efficient NVIDIA Volta GPU architecture, the Tesla V100 is a big compute powerhouse, delivering 3x the training performance compared to its predecessor.

"Cloud providers claim they are getting better at helping companies reduce some of their cloud spending. For example, AWS recently claimed it saved AWS users $500 million by alerting customers when they were overpaying," said Kim Weins, VP of Cloud Cost Strategy at RightScale. "Unfortunately, this is just a drop in the bucket. RightScale has seen that companies waste, on average, 35 percent of their cloud spend. This equates to $6.4 billion in annualized wasted cost for AWS alone. For the top three public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), this represents annualized waste of $10 billion."

SignalFx, a leader in real-time operational intelligence for data-driven DevOps, today announced an integration for comprehensive global monitoring for Google Cloud Platform. This integration allows enterprise-class Google Cloud customers to leverage the real-time, end-to-end operational intelligence of the SignalFx solution. Global organizations can get alerts in real-time from SignalFx's streaming analytics platform across their entire technology stack. From infrastructure to applications critical information will be uncovered every second of every day so unwanted issues can be instantly fixed. The integration currently is live across many Google Cloud Platform services.

Cyber security is one of the biggest threats to small business we have right now. Of course, big businesses deal with a lot of cyber security threats as well. But the difference is a giant and established business can take a hit from cyber security threats more so than smaller businesses who may not have all of the resources to recover, or the finances.

The cloud has without a doubt changed the way we store and safeguard our information, but with new opportunities come new threats. Here are some ways that cyber security applies to small businesses and affects them in the most crucial ways, even in the age of the cloud and increased cyber security. And it may be a bigger deal for you small business owners than the corporate giants.

Financial organizations who want to include cloud services within their trading infrastructure can now benefit from a new connectivity solution from Transaction Network Services (TNS) which addresses the mission-critical requirements of the global financial markets.

TNS Secure Cloud Connect has been designed to provide secure, resilient and easy access to a range of cloud services, including those from the major cloud providers. It facilitates connectivity to the cloud as well as from a firm's presence in the cloud to TNS' vast global financial community which includes more than 2,000 endpoints. Where cloud providers use a regional set up, TNS Secure Cloud Connect enables cross-region connectivity to help make the infrastructure more efficient and redundant.

Alex Walker, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of TNS' Financial Services Division, said: "Cloud services are rapidly expanding and it's no surprise that financial organizations have now begun to deploy these services. The cloud can provide greater flexibility and allow cost savings, but these benefits can be undermined by using unreliable and insecure public internet connectivity.

Skytap, Inc., a global cloud provider, today announced Skytap Cloud integration with third-party cloud services, which will enable enterprises to select services from IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other public clouds to extend the value of traditional applications. These new capabilities will be delivered in the first half of 2018, further differentiating Skytap Cloud as a direct path for enterprises to iteratively modernize mission-critical applications without disrupting business operations.

The company also today announced it appointed Neil Holloway to its executive team as senior vice president of business development. Tapped to continue expanding Skytap's partner ecosystem, Holloway joins the company during a period of sustained growth and momentum. Skytap's business continues to accelerate with five of the company's top ten customers closing this year and existing customer upgrades growing nearly 300 percent year over year (YoY) in Q3.

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of the SAP Vora solution on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, an integrated solution that pairs enterprise-grade Kubernetes with actionable big data insights. The combined technologies help enterprises to orchestrate data of nearly any volume, velocity, and variety to drive faster and smarter business decisions as a component of a consolidated, enterprise big data hub.

SAP Vora on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a continuation of the strong collaboration between Red Hat and SAP to support a variety of enterprise applications and big data scenarios. Running on Kubernetes clusters and Linux containers powered by OpenShift, SAP Vora provides containerized analytics engines and services and collects big data via Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and directly from cloud environments to use for actionable business intelligence. Red Hat OpenShift delivers a scalable platform upon which these capabilities can run, integrating containerized services and SAP Vora resources for a unified, flexible offering.

BlueData, provider of a leading Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) software platform, today announced that it has signed a reseller agreement with Dell EMC, becoming a Select partner in Dell EMC's Technology Connect Partner Program. The two companies will deepen their go-to market relationship to deliver the BlueData EPIC software platform to Dell EMC's enterprise customers across the globe.

BlueData EPIC software uses Docker container technology to help simplify and accelerate the deployment of Big Data analytics and data science environments in the enterprise. Together, Dell EMC and BlueData provide a comprehensive solution to accelerate time-to-value and reduce TCO for Big Data infrastructure. With Dell EMC and BlueData, enterprises can deliver exceptional simplicity, speed, efficiency, and performance for their Big Data implementations.

Dell Technologies Capital is an early investor in BlueData, and an active member of their Board of Directors, providing valuable business guidance and access to the broad Dell Technologies ecosystem. This latest agreement deepens the go-to-market relationship between BlueData and Dell Technologies and is an important step in helping the company to continue to scale its business.

CloudHealth Technologies today announced the CloudHealth Container Governance Module, the industry's first ever container governance offering, enabling customers to unleash the full business potential of containers without sacrificing governance or visibility.

Container adoption is skyrocketing. Gartner predicts more than 50 percent of enterprises will be running containers in production by the year 2020.1 Hand in hand with containerized deployments is the move toward serverless and functions-as-a-service, with adoption of offerings like AWS Lambda climbing rapidly. Yet a containerized, serverless world, for all its speed and flexibility, also presents significant challenges -- such as loss of visibility. In the shifting sands of this "black box" environment, enterprises struggle to determine which services and apps are consuming resources and driving cost, and to understand consumption and utilization.

"Running a containerized environment helps us maintain our incredibly high standard of agility of feature velocity," said Ben Chess, Director of Engineering, Yelp. "At the same time, transparency is a must, so we can measure resource consumption and allocate costs appropriately across our hybrid environment. CloudHealth lets us maximize the value of our container deployment by telling us how well utilized it is and whether our clusters have the right mix of supporting resources. That insight is pivotal: It enables us to make informed, strategic business decisions without additional overhead."

VirtuLocity Networks, a software acceleration platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company, today announced a free 15-day trial of its patented congestion control solution, VLNCloud, on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Available on AWS Marketplace, VLNCloud can be installed here. The company's patented solution, which launched last month at Mobile World Congress Americas after successful beta trials with CDNs and mobile operators, demonstrates improved cloud connections throughput and data payload transport time by up to 80 percent, which can be seen on the website here.

"End users attempting to access video-based real-time applications have long experienced sub-par network conditions due to packet loss, delay, and jitter - an issue that is only getting worse as wireless and mobile usage becomes more ubiquitous," said Mike Sapien, Chief Analyst at Ovum, Global Research and Advisory firm. "Some SD-WAN technologies have been built with complex, costly options to address improved application performance with features such as virtual rerouting, DNS steering, and edge caching, but there is actually a large market opportunity to tackle the issue directly with basic WAN and internet connections themselves."

Lacework, the industry's first solution to bring automation, speed and scale to cloud security, today announced new features that enable Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to easily and continuously maintain an AWS cloud configuration that is compliant with proven security best practices. Lacework now automatically reports on the configuration's adherence to the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark for AWS.

Lacework has also introduced security controls targeted at AWS S3 buckets, enabling AWS customers to rapidly identify S3 buckets at risk or compromised due to misconfiguration. Through a targeted auditing of S3 configuration, Lacework ensures that all buckets are configured with best practices for logging, encryption and versioning, then provides continuous monitoring with AWS CloudTrail events and workload activity analysis.

"Deploying new initiatives to the public cloud brings a spectrum of new security challenges that many organizations are not yet familiar with," said Dan Hubbard, Chief Security Architect, Lacework. "Starting with the daily validation of the AWS configuration (AWS accounts and AWS resources such as S3 buckets), to the continuous monitoring of workloads deployed on AWS, the Lacework cloud security platform enables organizations to safely migrate data to AWS and deploy applications in AWS."

Databricks, provider of a leading Unified Analytics Platform and founded by the team who created Apache Spark, today announced it has become a partner with Microsoft to expand the reach of its Unified Analytics Platform and address customer demand for Spark on Microsoft Azure. Databricks' Unified Analytics Platform will be offered as an integrated service within the Azure Portal as Azure Databricks. The new Azure service, introduced today at the Microsoft Connect 2017 conference, makes it easier for organizations around the globe to derive value from their Big Data and realize the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"Our alliance with Microsoft is a major milestone for the growth of Databricks' Unified Analytics Platform," said Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and CEO at Databricks. "There's a large base of Microsoft Azure customers looking for a high-performance analytics platform based on Spark - and Databricks is already the leading Cloud platform for Spark. These organizations will be able to simplify Big Data and AI with Azure Databricks."

John ‘JG' Chirapurath, general manager of Data Platform Marketing, Microsoft Corp. said, "Our work with Databricks and the development of Microsoft Azure Databricks has been driven by customer demand. Azure users will benefit from the fast and collaborative Apache Spark based analytics platform optimized for Azure, and through the integration with other Azure services, such as Microsoft Power BI, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Active Directory."

SingleHop, a global provider of on-demand hosted private clouds and managed cloud services, today announced a collaboration with ThousandEyes, a leader in Network Intelligence, to enable greater visibility beyond its five data centers in North America and Europe. The ThousandEyes platform provides insights into networks anywhere around the globe, enhancing SingleHop's ability to provide the always-available and high-quality service required by SaaS, gaming, Hosted Voice and Communications, and other service provider customers.

"Customers rely on us to power their mission-critical applications with zero downtime and minimal latency," said Mike Davis, director of network operations at SingleHop. "Armed with the Network Intelligence gained from ThousandEyes, our network engineers are able to see upstream and across our WAN and the internet to mitigate performance-degrading events with higher precision and greater speed."

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today at its .NEXT on Tour conference in Toronto that Subaru Canada has deployed the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform for its mission-critical workloads. As one of the leading global automotive brands, Subaru Canada entrusts its high performance workloads to run seamlessly on Nutanix software, and has seen significant improvements since its initial deployment. Notably, the company has achieved performance improvements, easier infrastructure management, a reduced data center footprint and better relationships with its end users.

Subaru Canada runs all the company's business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, and virtual desktop (VDI) deployments on its Nutanix solution. By migrating these workloads to one web-scale platform from multiple servers and storage systems, the company has simplified its entire data center operation. Since making the change from its previous NetApp solution to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, the company has seen a significant improvement in the speed of the Nutanix system: the extract, transform and load (ETL) nightly process that used to take four hours now only takes two hours with Nutanix.

Digital performance management company, Dynatrace, today announced the availability of Dynatrace within the Microsoft Azure marketplace. This brings its seamless full stack monitoring to Azure's web apps, cloud services and virtual machines, to meet the complex cloud computing needs of today's businesses. Microsoft customers will now be able to deploy Dynatrace from the Azure Marketplace, to monitor across all environments and gain granular insight into the performance of modern applications.

"The availability of our solution in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace has prepared us for the new buying patterns and flexible pricing, and provides another mechanism for our customers to deploy with ease. Without any instrumentation at all, our out of box integration now brings AI-driven application monitoring and management capabilities to these Azure environments and .NET Core Apps," explains Steve Tack, SVP, Product Management, Dynatrace.